AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: You Get Proud By Practicing

 

 

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, You Get Proud By Practicing. In the mid 1960s, there was a new show on TV called The Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon. From then on, every year during Labor Day weekend, comedian and actor Jerry Lewis would ask viewers to donate money to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, or MDA, during his marathon broadcast, which would sometimes last over 20 hours. In the early ’70s, a young girl named Laura Hershey was recruited to be the show’s Colorado poster child. But Hershey grew to resent her role as “cheerful victim,” as she called it. She wanted to take the reins of her own life in hand, and so she became an activist. Long before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, in 1990, she was already fighting for the right to take the bus, visit a public building, and rent adequate housing. But she was also a poet. Her most famous poem, without question, is “You Get Proud by Practicing.” Courtesy of the Denver Public Library, I have an audio recording of Hershey reading her poem. Here’s an excerpt:

 

(RECORDING PLAYS)




You Get Proud by Practicing



 

If you are not proud

For who you are, for what you say, for how you look;

If every time you stop

To think of yourself, you do not see yourself glowing

With golden light; do not, therefore, give up on yourself.

 

(...)

 

Remember, you weren’t the one

Who made you ashamed,

But you are the one

Who can make you proud.

Just practice,

Practice until you get proud, and once you are proud,

Keep practicing so you won’t forget.

You get proud

By practicing.

 

(MUSIC PLAYS)

 

In 2010, Laura Hershey died, leaving behind her partner of 20 years, Robin Stephens, and the daughter the couple had adopted only two years before. She also left a big hole in the community of deaf and disabled people and disability activists. One of these people, poet and scholar Meg Day, decided to compile an anthology with Laura Hershey’s poetry. This volume, coedited with Niki Herd, is a part of Pleiades’s Unsung Masters Series, and the book contains not just poems, but also essays and ephemera—newspaper clippings, pictures of Laura Hershey protesting, handwritten drafts of poems. 

On one of the last days of last year, I sat down to talk with Meg Day over Zoom. And because they are deaf, we got help from ASL interpreter Emily Phipps, who you’ll hear mentioned at some point. So here’s my conversation with Meg Day.

 

Helena de Groot: I want to start at the beginning. When did you first meet Laura Hershey and what did you know about her or her work at that point?

 

Meg Day: I met Laura Hershey for the first time in Los Angeles, California, when we were both Lambda fellows. That was 10 years ago, in 2010. And for a few years prior, I had exchanged a few emails with Laura because I had read a poem of hers titled “You Get Proud by Practicing,” which is a very popular poem of hers, in an ADAPT pamphlet—ADAPT, the national grassroots community organizing disability rights activist group. And that poem popped up a lot in early ADAPT, or my experience of early ADAPT pamphlets, and guided a lot of my early understanding of disability pride and its power and its importance to the disability rights movement. So I first encountered her through that poem and then I wrote to her, maybe a few years before I met her in 2010, not knowing that she was queer, and in my mind, discovering a poet who proudly identified as disabled deserved celebration enough. And so we exchanged a few emails over the years. Nothing, you know, not too fluent of a conversation. And then we finally met in 2010 at the Lambda Fellows residency. Which was exciting and intimidating. And joyful.

 

Helena de Groot: Intimidating, tell me how, what was intimidating?

 

Meg Day: You know, Laura ... my impression of Laura in person matched my impression of her on the page.

 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

 

Meg Day: She was a force, right. Like, direct, well-read, perceptive, witty, easy to talk to, but also intimidating. I was intimidated by her, in the best way, I think. She did not seem to participate in any of the apologizing or the explaining or the pandering that our culture or even, like, poetry at large, encourages and seems to require of disabled folks and queer folks and marginalized folks of any outsider status. So she seemed to have this very strong sense of self and a kind of “don’t fuck with me” approach to the page. I don’t know that I can cuss in this, but that’s how I felt. It impressed me in the most literal sense. It imprinted on me, really, if that makes sense.

 

Helena de Groot: It does. And it is remarkable. It leaps off the page. I’ve never met her, and yet it was clear as day that she has, as you say, a strong sense of self. And I wonder if you have any idea where this came from. I mean, was she just born this way, was this her temperament? Was there a person that she met along the way who really kind of shifted her outlook? Do you know what happened?

 

Meg Day: (LAUGHS) I love that you ask, was she born this way.

 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

 

Meg Day: Such a crucial question, I think, in terms of queer rights and disability rights. So I can’t answer that question for her, but I’m sure there were many influences. I know that Laura’s involvement in Jerry Lewis’s telethon early in her life as a young person and her subsequent radicalization as one of Jerry’s orphans, a group of ex-telethon kids turned disability rights activists who organized actions against the MDA Labor Day Telethon. And they did that because of its infantilization and its inspiration porn quality and the pity approach to disability. I imagine that was formative.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

 

Meg Day: From her archives it’s obvious that Laura’s own mother was, like, deep into advocating for her daughter’s inclusion and access and education. All of this, like, pre-ADA, obviously. 

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah, right.

 

Meg Day: I have my doubts that there was just one moment.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: But many moments that begin to collide and to build until one has a vocabulary and a sense of self within these systems that seek to control us.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. You met Laura in the same year that she died, right? How many months before? 

 

Meg Day: I went to the Lambda residency the first week of August. So, three months, four months before Laura died.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: Yeah, very unexpectedly, suddenly. It was awful, painful. 

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah, she had so many plans, too, right? I mean, just adopted a daughter. I mean, it’s, yeah, it’s awful. I’m wondering with, you know, how little time you knew each other in person, what brought you to come forward as a person who wanted to compile an anthology with her work? How did that come to be and why you?

 

Meg Day: (SMILES) You know, residencies like Lambda are among those strange special spaces where time warps and everyone is so thrilled to be among kin for the first time, often for the first time, having our own folks read our own work and you come out of that different and bonded and ... our class of poets, I think, was still very much in that space when Laura left us. We were emailing often as a group and sharing work and planning projects, and then one of us was just gone. And there were other disabled queer writers in that room, too, which is a kind of like, how to say ... is a kind of like, deeper wound, right, like queer crips, queer and trans dis folks. I didn’t have very many of us in my life until then. And so it was a new kind of mourning. And we did it separately and together, but we did it alongside hundreds of folks internationally mourning Laura for a life that most of us had very little idea of. 

 

Helena de Groot: Mm.

 

Meg Day: I don’t want to speak for anyone else in our workshop, but I remember reading more about her and just being kind of shocked and awed at how many lives she had already led and how rich they were and impactful. And I remember thinking later that year that someone should put out her book. She hadn’t yet had a full-length collection at that point, and she still hasn’t. It’s one of the things that I hope that this anthology, the Unsung Masters Series, will help bring about. And in 2011, Finishing Line put out a chapbook, Spark Before Dark. And while I was so grateful that it was in the world, I just wanted more.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: Chapbooks aren’t really meant to capture the breadth and depth of someone’s life work, right. And I obviously didn’t understand her in a way that many, many people were fortunate to know her and love her and work alongside her, especially with regard to disability activism and the disability rights movement and the ADA and ADAPT, and all the things that she had been involved in in Colorado. But it felt to me like it would be possible to put my own editorial skills toward this project and still retain, I don’t know … the … like, that first spark, right? Like, the desire to, like, know someone better. And so when I went looking for a venue that might be able to accommodate that, there were many things I was considering. I wrote to Laura’s partner and an executor, Robin Stephens, and corresponded with her about what might be possible. And I started querying presses, putting some feelers out, trying to find out, like, what might be possible. Would it be a collection? Did she have a collection ready to go? Would it be a biography of some kind? Would it be more focused on her work as an activist in the world? Would it be more focused on her poetry? And it just turned out that the Unsung Masters Series seemed like the kind of project that I felt equipped to do. So I was really grateful that this project moved in that direction and that Niki Herd came on board as the coeditor of the project, which was fantastic and crucial. Yeah, Kevin Prufer and Wayne Miller with the Unsung Masters Series, they ... my impression is that they saw the importance of the project immediately and that felt encouraging to me, because I didn’t want to just, you know, introduce Laura with nondisabled readers in mind. It felt a little bit like, here’s our elder, here’s someone who came before us, and she’s relatively well-known in activism circles, but relatively unknown in poetry circles.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: I still encounter disabled poets—well-known disabled poets—who have not read Laura Hershey. 

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: We have a difficult time finding one another.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: But also we just … because of all of the realities that we experience, many of us don’t live very long.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: And so I think in some ways it was self-serving, certainly. It felt as if this woman that I was finally coming to know more intimately and more personally and to understand as an elder had been taken far too soon, but taken from me far too soon.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: And … I had no idea what was in store. (LAUGHS) I had no idea. I had not been to the archives in Denver. I’d just exchanged emails with Robin and read as much of Laura’s work online as I could and ... yeah, I really had no idea what I was getting into.

 

Helena de Groot: Well, I want to ask you about that, too. Especially because you just mentioned that during her lifetime, there was no full-length book of her poems that ever came out. And so I can imagine that, then, the shape that you encountered her work in was all over the place. Could you tell me a little bit about the specifics of, okay, you went to the library, what did you find? I mean, were there boxes? Was it really that disorganized?

 

Meg Day: So many boxes. (LAUGHS) It’s paper and printed emails and notebooks and ephemera, like hand-scratched notes on the back of receipts and photographs and letters, buttons, and flags and formal invitations from the president of the United States, and awards, newspaper clippings, everything. (LAUGHS) And one of the best parts of going through Hershey’s papers was discovering the paperwork—I may get this a little bit wrong, but my recollection of it is, the paperwork for the official notice that the Denver Public Library was being sued for being inaccessible. And then the documentation of how the Public Library became accessible, and then to be sitting in the Public Library that Laura Hershey helped to make accessible, looking at her papers, which was kind of a ... (LAUGHS) you know? It was this incredible moment of really understanding in a totally new way, entirely separate from poems, just how crucial this particular woman was and her role in so many sites of life-changing, infrastructure-changing, activism. But the folks at the Denver Public Library were incredible. They were incredibly accommodating. You know, even to the point that there are audio recordings of Laura reading a lot of her work. And I was worried that there were poems that were only audio recorded and not, there was no, like, written textual documentation of them. And so the archivists at the Denver Public Library are like helping me from the listening booth, they’re helping me string the audio cable to a microphone that attached to a CapTel, which is like a, it’s a kind of telephone I use—

 

Helena de Groot: Okay. 

 

Meg Day: —where you have a receiver, but there’s live captioning happening.

 

Helena de Groot: Ah! Right, right, right. 

 

Meg Day: So we hooked up the audio recording to a microphone that fed to a CapTel so that I could get access as a deaf kid. You know, it’s like this conflicting access moment of ... it’s really important that we have these audio clips of Laura reading in the way that she read as the body that she was, but I can’t hear it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: But yes, the archive has dozens of boxes, which was at that point for me, overwhelming. It’s my understanding that there is an even larger repository of new work in private digital files that are not a part of her public archive. And so, like, the woman was prolific. And thank goodness.

 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yes! 

 

Meg Day: And so I wanted to get my hands on everything so that we could put together a collection that truly represented at least a portion of this poet’s life. And I was hysterical a lot of the time. (LAUGHS) I would excuse myself from the archives and just weep in the restroom or have to take a walk outside in Denver. Because it was overwhelming. To ... I don’t know, it was one of the most difficult things to come to know this woman in a more intimate way, but without her there. Like, some of the things I felt like I shouldn’t know, from personal correspondence, or from a photograph. And not that I shouldn’t know them like they were embarrassing or they were too private to share. But like, some things, you wish that someone had told you themselves or ... I wish we had become good enough friends for her to share something with me herself or show me or explain to me. And that, you know, just made me miss her in this way that I didn’t know prior to that was possible because I didn’t really, you know, I knew her in a … very small ... I knew a very small part of her life.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: And it was difficult to decide how best to represent this woman that like, many people knew in a far more comprehensive way. I don’t know what Laura’s poetry community looked like, but it seemed small compared to her activist community, which was wide and international. Which is not to say that they didn’t touch, right. Like so much of Laura’s poetry is her activism.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: And so many people who were activists knew her by name because of the presence of her work in activist rags or newsletters or pamphlets. So ... I don’t know in the end, since poetry is one of the primary ways in which she documented many of the more personal private aspects of living and loving and fighting as a disabled lesbian, I think that we ... I just feel lucky. I feel like we lucked out. (LAUGHS)

 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

 

Meg Day: It was transformative.

 

(MUSIC PLAYS)

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I also have a question that is maybe more personal. I wonder, when you go to the supermarket and especially now with Covid, now that we’re all wearing masks, I don’t know if and how you rely on lip reading, but if you do, well, you can’t do a lot of that right now, I imagine. And so, in a way, to borrow the language from queerness, you have to come out to perfect strangers multiple times a day. And … I don’t want to imagine what it’s like to be you, but I would not like that. I would not be in the mood for that every day. And Laura did not have to come out because people saw the wheelchair. And so, in that sense, I can imagine that there was one less thing that she had to constantly work up the courage to do. And so I wonder if it drains your energy to always have to come out, to always have to say, could you, point at the thing, because with the mask, I can’t—I have no idea what you’re saying, you know? 

 

Meg Day: Yeah. I … this is so dynamic. And it’s true that in this year of a global pandemic with Covid and hopefully masks, mask-wearing, like, that’s the best-case scenario, right, that we wear masks, even if you are talking to a deaf person who primarily relies on lip reading or speech reading, which I do. There are so many things I want to say. Yes, it is exhausting, but it is exhausting because ableism is exhausting and audism is exhausting. And here’s a moment culturally where we see that we are not prepared in so many ways. (LAUGHS) We see how unprepared we are with regard to access, with regard to our pace of living. You know, there are so many ways that I could answer this question, beginning with all of my students who require accommodations, but up until this point have been refused them because you aren’t supposed to or can’t quote-unquote, “can’t,” attend school virtually or you “can’t” get extra time on assignments or, like, do you understand what I’m saying? Like, it’s ... now that the entire world is implicated, we’re interested in certain kinds of access that we required before, but did not want to prioritize because it supposedly only affected disabled folks, a certain population that we systemically undervalue—devalue. And actively try to eliminate.

 

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

 

Meg Day: And so I think that I’m exhausted, yes, but I want to say that I’m no more exhausted than usual. It’s just that it’s ... I finally have more company. It’s as if there is a slight moment of, I don’t know, introspection or new perspectives on the part of my greater community. Which is to say, you don’t know how many times I’ve been asked this question since Covid started, right?

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: Absolutely no concern for my capacity to speech-read in public or lip-read in public when folks’ backs are turned, when they approach me from behind, when there is a lot of sensory disruption, prior to this moment.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: And so, yes, masks make it 100 percent impossible to read your lips. (LAUGHS)

 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Right.

 

Meg Day: And also, it makes it very difficult for a lot of people in new ways who have not yet experienced this. And that is what I’m most interested in. I’m most interested in this moment where we see the ableism and the audism in the very fabric of how it is that we move about the world.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: But, even so, I want to rewind to what it was you were saying about coming out and visibility. You’re right to draw a distinction and nuance between folks who are traditionally understood as visibly disabled and folks who are invisibly disabled, though even those terms are troubling and we should trouble them, because there are so many things that non-disabled folks assume about what it means to be visibly or invisibly disabled. I can spot a deaf kid from across a parking lot, right.

 

Helena de Groot: Wait, how?

 

Meg Day: They don’t have to be signing. You know, I don’t know. It’s the same way, I don’t know, people have gaydar. (LAUGHS)

 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

 

Meg Day: They way they move in the world, there’s a different kind of vocabulary of the body. So yes, I do think, obviously, that folks who are more visibly disabled experience the world in radically different ways than someone such as myself who moves through the world with, you know, my tech on my ears and unless I’m with an interpreter or signing in public, it’s not immediately obvious that I am deaf. And I think that those things obviously impact our lives, our access, needs, and also our work. But I think that there is something about …  (SIGHS) let me think a second. There’s something about the risks that all of us take in our work when it is that we are identified and maybe tokenized and maybe pigeonholed as a particular demographic identity. And I think that sometimes we have to weigh the risks. Like ... it’s  ... I can say this: I think that we may do a grave disservice to assume that folks who are visibly disabled do not have to do labor. Right, like Laura Hershey may not have had to come out as disabled. She didn’t have to, like, tap you on the shoulder and be like, “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

 

Meg Day: It was done unconsensually, which is a kind of violence in this culture.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: And speaking intersectionally, and not to conflate experiences, but I think as someone whose body is read as gender deviant and moves through the world being unconsensually read as occupying some sort of, like, in-between space, between the binaries, gender binaries, that also feels, like ... you’re right, I don’t often have to come out as queer.

 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

 

Meg Day: And yet, that puts me in a totally different location for violence, for assumptions, for misunderstandings. I think of so many of my kin who unconsensually have their like, someone takes control of their wheelchair and says, “I’m just going to push you up the hill.” Or people who have hands laid upon them and are prayed, literally, prayed on in public. That there’s this kind of protection that comes with being less visible, regardless of what that visibility reveals or discloses and that there is a kind of labor in it also.

 

Helena de Groot: Yes. 

 

Meg Day: And so I wish to sort of remove the false binary of invisible and visible, and then also to ... to move us away from thinking that there is some kind of relief in being visible or that there is some sort of  ... liberation inherent in not having to announce yourself and having your body announcing you instead. I think that ... I just think it’s so much more nuanced and complicated, dangerous, but also beautiful than that.

 

(MUSIC PLAYS)

 

Helena de Groot: I want to get to a poem. I wanted to ask you to read the poem “Special Vans,” which is on page 67 of the book. And I don’t know if you remember anything about this poem, particularly, when you came across it in the archive, if there’s anything at all you’d like to say before you read it, that would be great.

 

Meg Day: Sure. I do remember coming across this poem. And it was printed from a word processor, like a speech to text word processor, and I remember reading it and thinking, “This woman is bold! Like, I love this poem!” (LAUGHS) So, yeah, I think that this is such an important poem, not just because it shows Laura’s voice in such a rich way, but also because I think it’s a poem that teaches us a lot about a moment at the same time that she is lyric and funny and also narratively really powerful. 

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day:

 

(READS POEM)

 

Special Vans

 

The city’s renting special vans

the daily paper reads

The cops are getting ready

for special people with special needs.

 

The mayor’s special crip advisor

has given special training

in moving all our special chairs

when arresting and detaining.

 

They’ve set up special jail cells

in a building on the pier.

They’ve brought in special bathrooms

and nurses — never fear.

 

They cops are weary of our bodies

they treat us in a special way

special smiles, if you’re lucky

special brutality when you’re in the way.

 

Bush’s campaign office gives us

all the special treatment we can take;

locked doors and angry words

while Clinton’s office gives us cake.

 

The ones who run the nursing homes

think they’re doing noble deeds —

locking up our friends in cages

special people with special needs.

 

They put up special barricades

to try to keep us out

still we’re in their face 

still we chant and shout.

 

What’s so special really

about needing your own home?

If I need pride and dignity

is that special, just my own?

 

Are these really special needs

unique to only me?

Or is it just the common wish,

to be alive and free?

 

* * *

 

Helena de Groot: Thank you.

 

Meg Day: Whew! I love that poem. (LAUGHS)

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: It’s powerful.

 

Helena de Groot: It is powerful! And she does this thing that I feel like she does in a lot of her poems, which is, she starts off really funny. It’s sort of on the nice side of sarcastic. But then there’s a turn where she turns towards more sincere territory. And yeah, I mean, let me grab the poem again. “Are these really special needs / unique to only me? Or is it just the common wish, to be alive and free?” And you read it so beautifully, too. I think you really got to some of the anger that is underneath that, some of the exasperation. And so, yeah, I wonder how you relate to this poem and to all those rhetorical layers in there?

 

Meg Day: I think one thing that Laura Hershey, one of the many things she excels at, includes her play with language and her sort of fearless play with language, right. She often takes up all of the words that have been used to shape her or restrict her or deem her in some light that is less than. And she doesn’t just ... I don’t really know that she reclaims it. I don’t know that Laura Hershey’s interested in reclamation. I think she is interested in, like, turning it back on folks and saying, “This. Is this how you meant to hurt me? This thing right here?” Right. I mean, like, she remakes the word “special” in this poem, right? Like, we use the word “special”—special needs, special education—we use it so we … we being, I think, nondisabled culture at large, uses it so sort of offhandedly and casually, as if it is some kind of gift. That we have corrected some wrong by being more politically correct or by taking language and helping soften what it is that’s behind that word. And I think so much of what Laura’s work does, is says, it doesn’t need to be softened. You do! Right? Like, I’m trying to soften you instead of having the language front for you or act as some kind of facade or mask that makes us seem different in ways that we are not.

 

Helena de Groot: Hmm.

 

Meg Day: And I don’t think that Laura was the kind of person that was like, “Oh, well, we’re all just human, can’t we just get along,” you know. I don’t think she was seeking to reduce people down to the mere fact that we together are mortals. I think she felt—I can’t speak for her, but my impression from her work and from our conversations is that she felt that identity and the power of labels were actually crucial in helping understand one another and honor experience. It didn’t exist to separate us. But so when I read this poem, I think, here she is doing one of the things that she does best, which is … is to … manipulate language in a way where we see it for what it is by seeing ourselves for who we are. I love that stanza on the end of that first page. “The ones who run the nursing homes / think they’re doing noble deeds” and then that em dash, right, “locking up our friends in cages / special people with special needs.” I don’t think that there are a lot of folks who understand nursing homes as anything outside of like a charity or a care model that is supposedly good.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

And to follow that up with the penultimate stanza on that last page, “what’s so special really / about needing your own home? If I need pride and dignity, / is that special?” Right, like— 

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: I learn a lot from her. When I read her work and I focus on how it is that she chooses not to reclaim language, but instead to turn it over and to remake it and to give it back to the reader as a kind of, overcooked idea. I’m grateful for it. I feel like I’m still a student of it.

 

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I find that so interesting that she seems to ... and as I’m saying it, I know this cannot be true, but I have the impression that she did not have any internalized ableism. She lived in society, so I’m pretty sure that’s not true, but she seemed to have a lot less of it, you know? And so I wonder if there’s a technique that she uses in, as you say, not reclaiming a word or not, you know, making it sound nice again. Which one would do with a word like “queer” or any of those words that used to be used as a slur and then are reclaimed, but yeah, a word like “special needs” where she just—or “special”—where she just shows, like, “This is a euphemism you guys seem to need. You’re not really saying anything about us with that.” I wonder if there’s a technique in there that you in your work use.

 

Meg Day: Oh, interesting ... a technique. I want to say that what you just said was so beautifully put. That that’s it exactly. That there is a way in which language betrays us. That the things that I say betray how it is that I feel about a thing. And so, I think immediately of the social media like hashtag campaign #SayTheWord, which was like a move toward or continues to be a move toward asking people to just say “disability” or just say “disabled” instead of creating some kind of, like, linguistic agility course where you have to say like, “a person who is living with a disability of this nature, etc.”

 

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

 

Meg Day: You know, all of the euphemisms. What is one I heard recently? Differently … differently phonocentric, I think, was the new … was a new description of hard of hearing, was like, differently phono-accessible. Oh, that might have been it. Differently phono-accessible. Right, I’m like, “Wow, like, let’s just say ‘deaf.’” We have a word for that. (LAUGHS)

 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

 

Meg Day: And so we reveal ourselves and what it is that we prioritize, certainly, and what it is that we are afraid of when we use language that avoids reality, I think, and avoids access to pride. Obviously, I think people should be, you know, that one should choose how it is that one wishes to be called or referred or named, in all ways. And so if it is that you would prefer person-first language, like, “people with disabilities,” that’s your choice entirely. But it does deviate from a pride-disability centric model in which we are not afraid of ourselves. And I’m not sure yet how it is that I’m tending that in my own work. Certainly, I feel more empowered and I feel bolder than I once did. I think of my own coming up as a poet and I think of how much time I spent trying to assimilate and trying to prioritize hearing readers and a hearing audience and the sonics of a poem. Good god, the sonics of a poem. Trying to learn how it is that hearing poets understand lyricism and rhyme. And these are not things ... these are things I understand, but I understand them visually and corporally, I understand them in a multi-modal, physical way. That rhyme is a kind of repetition that occurs constantly on the body, and that one can do by shifting their shoulders in the same way or keeping their hand in the same place or using a similar hand shape over and over. The idea that a rhyme is just a shared vowel (LAUGHS) is like, what? So it took a lot of … a lot labor to bend myself into what it is that Hershey is constantly resisting. And I could talk for a long time about why it was that I felt compelled to do that or what internalized ableism was at play in those decisions. But I’ll just leave it at the fact that American poetics does not include all Americans. I mean, we know this, right? (LAUGHS)

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: It’s not as if disabled folks are the only ones being waylaid. But I do think that disability remains … at least in language, and at most, in physical like, real form, a kind of afterthought.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: Or a thing also to play with, right, if it is that one can reduce you down to “special” or reduce you down to some sort of linguistic acrobatics that avoids you, then it really becomes a difficult moment of like, what are the ethics of language play when language is how people are valued. Identified and valued. And also identified and then eliminated.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: So I don’t know that I have a technique. (LAUGHS)

 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) But I also think technique is just the wrong word. I used the wrong word. Language play is much closer to what it is, and I’m glad that you brought it up. But so, okay, let me ask you something else then. When you stepped away from prioritizing hearing readers, in your poetry, and you started to play as what you think is fun to play with, can you give me an example of something that hearing people may not know about that is really central to how you feel language in your body, or some other way. Is there something—I don’t know how to ask the question, because I’m not trying to put you in a direction. But is there something where you like to make two words vibrate with each other at a different level than the auditory level?

 

Meg Day: Yeah. I love how much you’re struggling with this question because it’s a difficult question.

 

Helena de Groot: Right! (LAUGHS)

 

Meg Day: It’s wild to try to have this conversation with language that only applies to a particular population, or, historically, has only applied or included a particular population. And the answer is yes, I feel as if I am constantly having fun by myself in my poems. (LAUGHS)

 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

 

Meg Day: And in content, I don’t know that I’ve ever held back much. Whether or not those poems find their way into publications or are allowed by editors into the final version of a published manuscript is another thing entirely. There’s a lot of resistance, and this is not something that I experience all on my lonesome. There’s a lot of, you know, awful anecdotes about publishers wanting to pull poems that include disabled content because it is unappealing or it doesn’t sound right or, you know, “medicalized language is not beautiful language.” That’s a quote, you know. (LAUGHS) In terms of actual play in my own poetics, I think that I’ve recently come to understand every poem that I write in English as a bilingual contrapuntal. So like a contrapuntal poem that can be read on the page, it often appears in like, one or more columns and you can read it across and then also down. And I like that term because it comes from music, which seems like an extra level of irony. (LAUGHS)

 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

 

Meg Day: And much of my work now, I’m making with signs in mind. I have a poem coming out soon, a long poem, about a queer relationship with chosen family, a brother of mine. And I use the word “brother.” The sign looks like this, and I use the hand shape of “brother” to make many things in the poem, and so there are these internal rhymes within the text that are not evident without the understanding that this handshape becomes many things depending on where you put it and how you move it. And I know that doesn’t really translate to a podcast. (LAUGHS)

 

Helena de Groot: Okay, so you did a motion with your hand that was sort of like a revolver, I think.

 

Meg Day: Sure, you say the L, the L handshape.

 

Helena de Groot: Right. And then can you tell me one word that is not brother, but that also has this L shape?

 

Meg Day: Sure. Like you can say “later,” you can say “lesbian,” put on a crown, you can ... Emily, what else have we got? “Lazy,” “later,”  “language.” Yeah, there’s lots of things that you can do with an L handshape, which is part of the linguistic play of ASL. Like this is a game I grew up playing, but it’s also a poetic technique. So those kinds of things. I’m very interested in not sacrificing any kind of linguistic complication that previously felt like I had to … I either had to sign the poem in ASL and not voice and like, I felt stuck there, or I had to be a poet who wrote in English and, like, avoided conversations of, you know, I had to pass. I had to understand how sound worked on the page, according to hearing people. I experience sound. It’s just not the way you experience sound.

 

(MUSIC PLAYS)

 

Helena de Groot: Well, since we’re talking about poems now, I was wondering if you can read the poem that is called “How to Write a Poem.” It’s on page 64. And again, I would love to know whatever you know about it, you know, if you know when Laura wrote it, in what context she wrote it, to whom. It seems almost to someone. And also how you came across it, if you remember that moment at all.

 

Meg Day: Sure. I remember coming across this poem in, I think it was in a chapbook, some kind of pamphlet. And it was not in like a traditional chapbook material, it was like some sort of short edition newsprint kind of material. And I remember also coming across this poem in the archive. You know, there used to be so many—not to say that there isn’t now, but, there used to be so many more well-distributed community rags. You know like disability-based newsletters or mailers, like things that you would get folded with a staple in them in the post. And so I remember seeing it in the archive in one of those newsletters and thinking, “How radical to receive this from like, a disabled comrade, and that this is the message.” It didn’t necessarily have to do with … it wasn’t overt disability activist commentary in the way that so much of the work that was sent out in those pamphlets certainly is.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: And so I like it for that reason alone. But I appreciate this poem particularly because it feels as if she is speaking to us. Like it feels, it feels as if she is speaking to me. And I love that first line, she says, “Don’t be brilliant.” Like, right there. She just takes everything off the table. I’ll read the poem. (LAUGHS) 

 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yes.

 

Meg Day:

(READS POEM)

 

How to Write a Poem

 

Don’t be brilliant.

 

Don’t use words for their own sake, or to show

how clever you are,

how thoroughly you have subjugated them

to your will, the words.

 

Don’t try to write a poem

as good as your favorite poet.

Don’t even try to write

a good poem.

 

Just peel back the folds over your heart

and shine into it

the strongest light that streams

from your eyes, or somewhere else.

 

Whatever begins bubbling forth from there,

whatever sound or smell or color

swells up, makes your throat

fill with unsaid tears,

 

whatever threatens to ignite your hair, your eyelashes,

if you get too close—

 

write that.

Suck it in and quickly

shape it with your tongue

before you grow too afraid of it

and it gets away.

 

Don’t think about

writing a good poem, or a great poem,

or the poem to end all poems.

 

Write the poem

you need to hear;

write the poem you need. 

 

* * *

 

Helena de Groot: Thank you.

 

Meg Day: I love that poem for so many reasons, but because in the middle of it, you get the sense that she’s not just talking about poems, right? And I think that that must have been so powerful. It was powerful when I first read it. It’s powerful even now as I read it. But I can’t imagine what it might be like if poetry never occurred to you as a way to document your experience as an activist, or document your life as a disabled person in the world. And she very clearly is like, you don’t have to be good at this. The point is not good. Just capture the thing before it gets away from you. Yeah, I imagine—I hope, my hope is that there were a lot of poems that came out of that.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: So.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I have one last question. At the end of the book there’s a series of essays and one of them is by a poet and disability activist, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. And she writes that she only really learned who Laura was after she died. And then only she went through her old Facebook friend requests and saw that, oh, actually, Laura had already asked her to be friends at some point, and she had just ignored it because she didn’t know who Laura Hershey was. And then she goes on to actually connect that to something that is quite common in the disability community, that you just don’t know about folks, because there isn’t really this kind of cultural space that you all inhabit, you know, like a certain corner of the internet or whatever, where you all recognize each other or can talk to one another. And so I’m wondering if that is also your impression, and if so, if that’s changing, and if it’s not changing, what needs to happen for that to change? 

 

Meg Day: I think ... I do think it’s changing, but it’s, well, I was going to say that it’s slow, but that’s not right, because slow is just fine. I think it’s overdue. I remember when (LAUGHS) this is not like eons ago, “I remember when …” But I remember when the first sick and disabled queers group, like Facebook group, came about. It was many years ago now. And there were like 50 of us. And hell, it felt like a new world. It felt like, oh, we are literally all over the globe and here are these names I recognize. And here are these people I’ve read but never met. It felt like a coming together, kind of a conference in the most radical way. For many years, I’d look to the acknowledgments page of disabled writers that I was reading and respected, many of whom have become family, Leah among them. I mean, that’s the incredible irony of this particular and devastating truth is that Leah and I have known each other for decades now, and that I knew Laura in the same time that I was in community with Leah. Like we were literally just one degree apart.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: So it’s, yeah, it’s helpful for me to remember that moment that we talked about before, when I wrote to Laura after reading “You Get Proud by Practicing” for the first time. I wrote to her and shared with her my experience of this poem, and it reminds me how important that is. That we advocate for our own connectivity. Anyway, I’d look to the acknowledgments pages, and I think for a long time that was how we found our people. But also through recommendation, often shocked, surprised that you, my comrade, are not reading this other disabled poet. Laura Hershey is the reason I started reading Constance Merritt, who is a blind Black lesbian poet, one of my favorite poets. And, you know, Laura Hershey might be the reason that I started reading Constance Merritt, but as far as I know, none of us share disabilities. We share queerness, absolutely.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: So this is where that—the beauty of intersectionality comes in, where, here are all of the ways in which we touch, and here are all the ways in which we can’t. (PAUSES) Yeah. It’s challenging. And it’s true that we had to go out and find each other. I hope that we’re making it easier. But what would make it easier (CHUCKLES) is access. A million times, access. Like, we can’t be in the room if we can’t get into the room, literally. We can’t be in the magazine if editors and publishers are always selectively excluding us or don’t know how to read us or are put off by words that describe us. And I think a huge part of that, for me at least, I know this is not everyone’s priority, but, like, refusing to tolerate ableism in publishing. It would be so easy. Just don’t publish any more ableist poems. You know, publishers get dragged for printing work that readers deem homophobic or racist or xenophobic or in the voice of unhoused folks, like … and I don’t mean to conflate experiences at all or to collapse them. Like, being disabled is not the same as being Black or being queer. But nobody blinks when Louise Glück wins the Nobel Prize for having written poems like “Cripple in the Subway.” And so if we just decided not to publish any more ableist poems, I think that we would find each other, we disabled folks, would find each other so much swifter. Like I don’t ever need to read about how something fell on deaf ears ever again. Like, you know whose ears are deaf? Mine. (LAUGHS) 

 

Helena de Groot: Right.

 

Meg Day: So I think that that’s where we’re at. I think there is a deaf and disabled movement. There’s definitely a deaf and disabled canon. It’s exciting. We’re here. And I don’t ... I don’t know that the next step, or the next ... (CHUCKLES) the next many efforts are ours to make.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Meg Day: I think that the majority nondisabled publishing world has to pick up the rest of the slack there. So, I’m eager for it. We’re waiting. We welcome it. We’re ready when you are. (LAUGHS)

 

(MUSIC PLAYS)

 

Helena de Groot: You can find a selection of Laura Hershey’s poems in the book Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master, which came out from Pleiades in 2019, and in the chapbook Spark Before Dark, which was published in 2011. In 2016, Laura Hershey was included in the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame, almost 20 years after President Clinton awarded her the President’s Award from the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities. Laura Hershey died in 2010. Together with Niki Herd, Meg Day edited the book, Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master. Meg Day is also the author of the full-length poetry collection Last Psalm at Sea Level, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver, and The Publishing Triangle’s 2015 Audre Lorde Award, as well as two chapbooks, When All You Have is a Hammer, and We Can’t Read This. In 2013, they were awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Meg Day teaches English and creative writing at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania with their partner & their hearing service dog, Goose. Special thanks to Emily Phipps for interpreting, to the Western History and Genealogy Department at the Denver Public Library for use of the audio clip of Hershey’s poem “You Get Proud By Practicing,” and to Robin Stephens for the permission to use it. To find out more about Laura Hershey and Meg Day, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.